In order to fully describe current technical level relating to the invention, all descriptions of all the patents, patent applications, patent publications, scientific articles and the like, cited or specified herein are incorporated by reference herein.
Virtual machine technologies use software to enable creation of a plurality of pseudo computer hardware pieces on a single computer hardware (a physical machine). The pseudo computer hardware is called a virtual machine. The virtual machine is able to run an operating system (an OS) and an application program (an application) just like a physical machine. An OS and an application can be executed on a variety of physical machines with a virtual machine environment, without depending on a hardware configuration of a physical machine.
A virtual machine in which an OS or an application has been installed can be reused by being stored in a virtual machine format. Non-Patent Document 1 discloses VMDK that is a virtual machine disk format of a virtual machine runtime environment, VMware ESX Server. A virtual machine stored in VMDK can be reproduced by being distributed to another VMware ESX Server environment.
Such a storage and reproduction technique of a virtual machine is expected to be used in a variety of industrial applications. For example, the technique is expected to be applied to disaster recovery that reproduces a system damaged in a time of a large-scale disaster at another site. Also, when constructing a system, the technique can be used for a purpose to transfer a system constructed in a test environment to a real environment as is.
However, the storage and reproduction technique of a virtual machine alone is not sufficient when considering that general enterprise systems and data centers are distributed systems in which a plurality of computers are connected via a network. Not only the configurations of an OS and application running on a single computer, but also configurations as a distributed system including network settings and application communications should be stored and reproduced.
To that end, an approach to package a plurality of virtual machines in a manner incorporating configuration information specific to a distributed system and store as a virtual machine package is being considered. Standardization of the format of the virtual machine package is now undertaken as OVF (Open Virtual Machine Format) of DMTF (Distributed Management Task Force). While the OVF defines the format, how to divide and package a distributed system is not prescribed.    Non-Patent Document 1: Technical Note, Virtual Disk Format 1.0, VMWare, Inc.    Non-Patent Document 2: Open Virtualization Format Specification, DSP0243, Distributed Management Task Force, Inc. (2010)    Patent Document 1: JP-A-2001-5865    Patent Document 2: JP-A-2006-293592    Patent Document 3: JP-A-2007-158870    Patent Document 4: JP-A-H8-69364